It’s been a rollercoaster ride for FanDuel and DraftKings over the last couple years. To quickly review, both companies received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and grew to unicorn valuations before regulation entered the scene. More recently, they attempted to merge their highly comparable products, but the FTC ruled against it and they decided to pursue different paths.
As the CEO of SidePrize, the 2016 Rookie of the Year according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA), I’ve had a front-row seat for all the developments. It’s been fascinating to watch the events unfold and note the ripple effects it has had throughout the industry.
Since the failed merger, FanDuel and DraftKings have been forced to chart their own paths again. While DraftKings is once again leading with marketing (see $1,000,000,000 prize for NFL Week 1), FanDuel has continued to be the innovator on the product side (keep in mind, FanDuel was started in 2009 well before DraftKings in 2012).
Heading into this NFL season, FanDuel’s big product release is an expansion of a release from last year that DraftKings also introduced. In 2016, both companies brought the concept of fantasy leagues to the daily fantasy format. This week, FanDuel expanded the concept of leagues to encompass ‘season-long’ competitions.
While ‘daily fantasy’ and ‘season-long fantasy’ have typically been the way to distinguish the two main different varieties of fantasy sports, that line is becoming increasingly blurred. For the record, I would recommend the industry adopts ‘traditional fantasy’ and a parallel new term to encompass the new variety. Maybe ‘New-age fantasy?’ I’m open to suggestions, but back to the latest development…
On one hand, I commend FanDuel and DraftKings for moving towards the traditional season-long format — there’s a reason it’s been around for decades and continues to grow every year. But, ‘season-long leagues’ that require teams to redraft every day or week is not what many of us working professionals are looking for.
As the latest FSTA statistics show, traditional fantasy remains the most popular fantasy sports variety by a wide margin. Rather than seeing ‘new-age fantasy’ companies head towards season-long, we want to see the traditional fantasy formats innovate. From a consumer perspective, the last two major innovations within the traditional format might be the introduction of real-time stat tracking more than a decade ago and more recently, the advent of auto-generated week-in-reviews for your team & league.
I Co-Chair the FSTA Research Committee and can tell you the research indicates there’s now 59.3M fantasy sports players in North America and 49.8M play the traditional variety. Breaking up the traditional format into more bit-size contests is the real solution to keeping sports fans and fantasy players engaged over the course of the season is — not reinventing the wheel entirely.
FanDuel is trying to solve the right problem, but they have the wrong solution. I wish them luck with this latest innovation, but the traditional fantasy format is engrained within social fabric and holds the key to fan engagement.